


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Angst, F/M, Gen, Memory, Romance, sight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 21:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7861006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bridget Brannan has the Sight but it means something different in the War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Mary Phinney had the Sight. Bridget Brannan had taken a few weeks to decide, but after the first three dreams, she was convinced. Bridget had been aware of her own abilities since she was a little girl; she had Seen the death of the Flannery boy who sat in the pew in front of her and had sat so still her mam had known she was not herself. Her granny had explained it was not that Bridget was not herself, she was more herself than most, but her mam had been passed over and only knew enough to bring her to Granny Margaret and say an extra prayer for her every night. Granny Margaret explained the Sight came from God, just as everything else did, but she mustn’t speak of it to Father Kelly, as surely the man would never understand. Bridget had learned how the Sight most often allowed a woman to see the deaths of the people around her, but not always and not only that. Some could See the past, much good it did them Bridget had always thought, and some could See into men’s hearts and minds, some more mind than heart. And some could See dreams.

Bridget had found she became accustomed to Seeing the deaths of those around her; she did not See them all the time and as she grew older and she lived through vigils and fevers than burned a baby’s brain in two days and the time Mrs. O’Sullivan, a young bride with flaming red hair hardly ever neatly braided, dropped to her knees in the street, struck stone dead within a breath, the departures did not burden her so greatly. All men died and Bridget Brannan merely knew the how and when of it, but never why God had chosen the time, the manner. Mamie O’Sullivan was a mystery Bridget turned over in her mind some nights when the rain knocked and knocked at Mansion House’s windows, asking to be let in. Had it been the woman’s heart or something in her head or was it the Devil Father Kelly had always preached about so seriously, snatching her away? Night was the time for musing and mulling, sucking on the stem of the crude pipe she preferred or cupping one hand around a crockery mug filled with weak tea. She had found her ways to trick her Sight and purposefully considering all the deaths that flickered around her, the ghost of it behind every person like a shadow, often provided a respite from her forced march into dreams.

It was fortunate she could only walk the dreams of others with the Sight, otherwise she would have had no rest at all and would have gone mad. Granny Margaret said it had happened so with Joanna O’Leary and might have explained how the girl had managed to drown in the Moy when she’d lived near it her whole life. Now, Bridget thought poor Joanna must have lost all the boundaries between day and night, dream and reality, wraith and soul and ordinary body; to lose the edge between the river-bank and the water, the water and the cloudy sky and tumble in would have been easier than taking the next breath. Bridget did not suffer with it so—she only found herself in the sleeping minds with those similarly afflicted and there were not that many within her sphere. Before the War, there had been her grandmother, whose dreams were homely, brown and grey, only the blue of her children’s eyes and Bridget’s bright hair for variation. On the great ship that had taken Bridget to New York City, a sailor had dreamed and dreamed of the glassy ocean and a white bird, a gull perhaps, flying away, almost into the sun, and a neighbor in the next street, black-haired Mrs. Flaherty, dreamed only of her first love, a tall man with hazel eyes like autumn leaves in the Moy’s shallows, hands outstretched and always calling “Mo mhuirnín!” 

Her oldest son had had the Sight. James had been a solemn baby, fortunate to be firstborn and a boy in that hard winter he was born; Bridget and her husband John had not minded cossetting the boy, doing whatever was needful to make sure James was warm and his belly full. His eyes had been such a dark blue that his fair curls were a continual surprise and Bridget was so taken with him that she could never quite bring herself to pay any mind to the death that he would meet. She would not have known he was so inquisitive without his dreams; in them, he spent hours tracking a horsefly or trying to catch a pigeon. At night, he climbed every tree he could find and flew through the air, the clouds catching about him like cobwebs. Was it because of this he always seemed the brightest of the children, the first to catch her eye, her ear always listening for his voice over his brothers? Or maybe it was just because he was the first, Patrick and John would always have seemed a little duller and more stolid, cut-down versions of James, their eyes a more ordinary blue, their hair sandy, cowlicked, indistinguishable from the neighbors’ sons.

All three of the boys had died well before the War. It wasn’t a blessing that they never had to fight for their country, not for themselves and not because some rich family paid them to take the place of their own son. They died of cholera, three more dead boys in the bed they had always shared, unremarkable except to their parents. Not even the priest could have said with surety he knew them any better than the O’Connor boys, the Sweeneys or the Byrnes. For Bridget Brannan, the world had been silent since that morning, her house without their demanding voices, her nights filled only with her own dreams, familiar and quiet. She dreamt of a rocking chair and the moonlight, the pull that nursing any of them had had, the small garden in back of her mam’s house, washing shirts that were sometimes shrouds, the linen rough against her hands, the washboard ridged as a cockleshell. She and her man spoke little without the boys present; they would have gone on that way she thought but he had no fight left in him, welcomed the pneumonia that carried him off in the winter. She’d caught his apology in his dying eyes that he was leaving her and forgave him for it. She’d been alone her whole life since the Sight took her and she’d never had the chance to explain to James what was within him, so it had never changed. Forgiving her husband was a mercy that was easy for her to mete out.

She’d worked and worked after they all died; she was Mam Brannan to the younger women of the neighborhood, always ready to help out, dandle the second youngest while the young mother grimaced and nursed the newborn on a sore nipple. She could always find a way to stretch the stew or mend a quilt that the rag-bag yearned for. The War was nothing to her at first, more men needy than women surely, but the same—endless work, fearful people she could always help and marvel at how scared they could be when there was so little left to scare her. She had her few pleasures—the clay pipe, the tea, an unbroken night. Sometimes, not always, she liked to see the sun rising up, less and less red, paler at the zenith. Nan Hastings’s overweening pride was an entertainment better than any burlesque but she’d seen how many times the younger woman had looked at Byron Hale hopefully before her eyes were uniformly hard. She expected the War to last longer than the rest but it wouldn’t tax her any more than the cholera, the typhus, whatever fever ran through the City. But then, there were more and more boys in Mansion House, their beds a floor or two away, so many it only made sense that some had the Sight as she did and then it was not as easy.

She could never tell by looking at them; they were only revealed at night. She’d been relieved not to have any particular insight into the doctors. She had enough of them by day—Summers’s half-hearted grasping after a desk job larded with his fatigue, Hale’s over-eager climbing in the hospital and all over Nan Hastings, Foster unable to heal the rifts within himself, his marriage, his country with his wit and effort and the attendant despair. The nuns slept quietly as caterpillars in their grey cocoons. It seemed every month, every week a boy’s dreams occupied her night the way the Union had taken Alexandria.

She hadn’t known what to make of the first lot—they were all color, crimson and ruby, then muddy shades, dirt soaked and dry, rubbed onto an unshaven cheek, dead brown eyes staring into a cloudy, muddled sky. The dead eyes hadn’t frightened her, but the dream had been overlaid with such a pervasive disgust and fear, without the sweetness of rot, just the scent of sulfur and crushed maggots. She’d woken with a gag but the basin she’d thrust under her chin had remained empty on her lap an hour later. The dawn had taken its time coming. It had gone on so the whole week, never more than fragments besides the swaths of color but she’d never before known how blue could feel like home and abandonment, red a holy terror, the pale grey of dawn slick as a lizard’s tongue, its deceptive, dry scales. She didn’t try to find out whether the boy died or was furloughed; it seemed unlikely his cracked mind, even if he was a little better awake, could have organized itself to pull a trigger or drag a bayonet through the rosy pink squirm of guts. That had been the last dream, the intestine shining against the gun’s dull stock, she perceived when she’d woken; the image had slipped back behind her eyes throughout the day and she skipped dinner, only smoked a second pipe. When she had woken the next morning, there had been relief at the familiarity of only her own nightmares, the screaming babbies and the empty pot, the empty breast.

She thought she knew the next one; he sang under his breath or hummed, during the day, the same hymns that ran continuously through his nights. The lyrics seemed tolerable the first night, “my ransomed soul” and “no lenient art” following each other round and round like her boys playing tag in the street below. But there was no respite—the words crowded him and her, forming themselves into monoliths, knocked down like dominoes, thorny like a briar, elusive and repellent as eels. They had been leached of comfort. She tried to send the tall Chaplain around to see if it would calm the man any and dutiful as a retriever, Hopkins had come to her to say the soldier had listened a little and then turned his face away “and I didn’t like to stay longer then, I haven’t found it helps them.” She tried encouraging Hale and Hastings, both of whom had decent singing voices and little enough decorum, to sing anything other than religious works as they went about their work; Nan was fond of old Scottish airs and Hale knew some unusual folk tunes from his travels with the military, but it did not change the nights. She tried to stuff bits of cotton rag in her ears but the sense was within the dream and nothing outside her mind could alter it. She even tried to focus her Sight, in a way she had never been able to articulate, on the looming deaths of everyone at Mansion House but the dreams went on, like an unremitting fever than might consume her. One midnight when she was half-dozing in her chair, she heard the music swell, angelic with a chorus of silvery trumpets and then the ringing of total silence. He must have died and she was only the better for it; she hoped his poor soul was too but the thought was fleeting, unlike her relief.

There had been a lull for a few weeks when she was left alone with her own dreams but then the tide turned and she was in danger of drowning. There were a pair of twins whose dreams were inversions of the other, a simultaneous clamor in her mind, and the boy who heard his mother calling him, all night long, every night, _Jonathan_. There was a man who dreamt of laying with the nuns who nursed him, coupling amid stigmata, the blood like roses in their mingled hands. And there was a young man, she thought he must be young, whose nights were filled with ants, great crawling heaps and mountains of them, shiningly black and busy; in unison, they would turn their eyes upon him and she could not decide whether he desired for them to surge over him and absorb him or whether that was the annihilation he feared the most. She spent the days with the feeling of thoraces and antennae eked along her skin, not only her hands where she could tolerate it, but within the whorl of her ear, the cleft of breast and buttock, running down her thighs like a miscarriage.

The night her dreams were full of snow, endless white fields with a distant border of white trees, a pale sun in a paler sky, she woke up nearly blinded but calm. The color and depth of the room around her returned slowly but she was not very distressed by the crystals still sparkling in her eyes. That dream came again and then a similar one of a blue lake under a blue sky, belted by the horizon and a narrow strip of gold—a sandy shingle or the last molten cloud of sunrise. She’d heard a few birds singing, none she could recognize, but they were in harmony with each other and with the lace of the waves sewing themselves onto the shore. These dreams were much more defined and coherent than the ones she’d been experiencing, she wondered at the soldier who had them. How had he gone through battles and kept his mind so serene?

She knew her mistake when the third dream came; she felt the familiar rustle of clean petticoats as she moved back and forth within the reverie, a younger pair of white hands arranging and re-arranging flowers in a vase. The petals were lively beneath her fingers, the stems sleek, green, almost running with sap. She kept glancing at a man too far away, laid in a white bed, who would reach out a hand and let it drop and still her own hands were busy with the roses and peonies, stock and columbine and aster, blossoms multiplying and crowding her. She felt longing and guilt and urgency but she was in amber except for her hands with their clipped nails, a little ink on her forefinger. There was a narrow gold band on one and infrequently, light caught on it and tangled. She found herself in her bed, the scent of stock still strong in her nostrils and the wish to knock over a vase, to lay a warm hand on a cool brow. She drifted up, aware she had walked through a woman’s dream and whose it must be—the Baroness, calling herself Nurse Mary, or Phinney; she’d discarded her married name so quickly Bridget had wondered at it but not anymore.

She noticed her own mood lightened as she spent her nights walking Mary’s dreams as often as a wounded boy’s. She fell asleep more easily, no longer bracing for the onslaught of disgust and terror, knowing she might find respite in a maple’s leaf or even the incomprehensible loveliness of whatever Mary von Olnhausen could do with numbers; Bridget could figure and keep an account book, but the younger woman had abilities Bridget could not comprehend, though she perceived them as she could a peregrine’s flight. She was not sure why she could so easily, so viscerally inhabit Mary’s dreams but there was no one to ask. She had only ever spoken with her Granny about the Sight and there were questions she had not thought to ask. It was a field of study without a scholar or priest. She turned to her Bible, as it was easiest to come by, and must have seemed curiously devout, her Book open upon her lap while she sucked at her pipe in the warm afternoons or evenings. Chaplain even offered to meet with her privately “as I wonder whether you have something troubling you, Matron,” and she’d laughed and nearly chucked his firm chin before saying, “I think it’d be a waste of both our time, but you’re good boy, Henry Hopkins, to be sure. Now, be about your proper business, mind.” She hadn’t found much to her purpose in her perusal of either Old or New Testament, but Psalms were soothing as always and she’d found she could dull the worst of a boy’s nightmare if she recited the lineages of Leviticus within her own mind, very loud and very slow, the Hebrew names building a fortress around her. She found her ways to cope and the Baroness’s mind and Sight proved a potent balm.

And then, there was an alteration. Mary’s dreams changed and it was a difference Bridget could not make out. When those twin brothers had slept and she’d walked through their minds, she’d had a foot in each, nearly split and destroyed by their identical opposition but this was not what happened. Mary’s dreams were being enriched somehow, as if she were folding in more fresh eggs and butter, a jug of cream, into a cake’s batter. Or perhaps it was more like weaving a braid; Bridget had grown accustomed to Mary’s visions of dressing her sister’s hair and it was the first time in thirty years that she’d spent that much time regarding a young woman’s bright bundle of hair, unbound. But she recognized those paradigms were deeply female and domestic and that was not the resonance of the reconfigured dreams. Bridget blamed it on the work, the series of battles like skipped stones, the touch of catarrh she’d gotten, for the time it took her to understand, for the night she realized, she felt a great fool and opened her eyes in the smallest part of morning to laugh at herself.

She’d recognized the paisley vest, the one that always caught her eye, the blue a little more indigo than it had a right to be, the fat-bellied swirls picked out in gilt thread that never tarnished. Jed Foster favored it for the Sunday service young Hopkins ran and first she’d thought he was preening like a peacock, his flashy dark gaze darting about, but he’d settled a bit as he worked at Mansion House and she’d learned the man was uneasy in his soul; he didn’t have the Sight, but she was an old woman and had learned the signs even without her gift. It could have been only Mary’s undisguised longing in the dream, the swing rocking on the porch with a salt breeze coming up from the bay, but there were enough details apparent to Bridget—the vest, but also the perfect pressure of an old pocket watch knocking against belly, the appreciation for the texture of Mary’s palm and the frisson her elbow against his ribs produced, the welcome weight of her head against Foster’s shoulder and the way the name “Molly” felt in his mouth, taken all together, it was clear Jedediah Foster was somehow dreaming with Mary. Bridget had never known the like—had Mary drawn the man in knowingly or had her Sight knitted them together where it saw them yearning for the other on some astral plane? Did Mary know what she did-- and did Foster? She began to wonder if Mary knew how Bridget herself joined her dreams. The mystery created no little apprehension but more intrigued interest; Bridget felt herself a botanist like Corporal Hamilton had been (oh how the man had talked!) discovering within a treacherous jungle a blossom many-petalled and of a fragrance unsurpassed but perhaps too intoxicating in the delight it promised…

That first dream had been sweet as a pale pink rosebud, courtship demure and a little sentimental. Mary had blushed to hear her name and the swing had creaked like a scolding chaperone when Foster’s lips had grazed Mary’s temple. Others had not been so innocent. For every dream of collegial work and domestic homeliness, Mary baking bread on a winter’s day, flour streaking her cheeks and the tip of her nose, Foster asking for a tenaculum she was already handing to him, there were many others where they embraced, in the warm, shadowed garden of Mansion House; chilled except for their covetous mouths among a stand of birches Bridget assumed were common in New Hampshire; on a balcony so festooned with lights amid a city’s spires, she knew it must be Paris or at least Foster’s best memory of the place. He kissed her and Mary did not sigh but gasp, was never pliant but always eager. Foster wept in her lap and she licked the tears from her fingers, then kissed the hollow at the base of his throat; his cravat mixed in with the bed linens that had been pulled off the bed. Mary raged and so did he, each in their way, and there came a blonde spectre in a silk bonnet, always in a doorway or walking through the woods like a dryad. Bridget began to pity them, so deeply in love, so close and yet so torturously apart; where his honor would falter, her virtue would assert itself. When Mary would cling, abandoned to her desire, her longing, Foster would step back, even if he choked on tears, on bile, to do it. Bridget was thankful that they did not dream so vividly, of such tender torment, every night but when they did, she found she could not return to sleep; she was too troubled to do more than doze the way she would with a fever.

Still, their dreaming was more tolerable than the devastation one man made with his nights, his fellows all toppling bricks, collapsed like shipwrecks, great heaving hulks of men crushed and dissolved, or the impossible, incurable itch within the case of her skull put there by the man who heard every other language but his own, always almost comprehending, perpetually alone in Babel. She watched Mary and Foster during the day, to see if their faces, the ease of their gait, the melody of their voices would tell her anything; she began to see the beginning of patterns. They would work together all day and then spend the night searching desperately through a darkened thicket or a barren beach that should not have been able to hide anything at all. Or Mary would be sequestered in the kitchens or away from Mansion House on a rare errand and then would spend a golden hour in Foster’s arms, being teased and tickled with long blades of grass, the petals of a buttercup, the doctor’s gentle mouth. Letters arrived erratically in Alexandria, but they always dreamt of them the same day. The night’s letters were from their dead, occasions for grief and jealousy and regret. The smallest domesticity, the setting down of a cup of coffee, straightening the fork’s tines beside the spoon’s shallow bowl, Foster tugging free the long sash of Mary’s apron to see her scold, all these would mean a night spent in abandoned languor, only ever a bed or firelight, Mary’s curls, her corset, her virtue all loosened and Jed Foster eager to plunder.

It was Mary herself who gave Bridget the idea; the nurse was always busy with her tonics, her mortar and pestle, the green rime of sage along her clipped nails. She dosed the men as best she could, to weaken catarrh and strengthen the blood, to thin thickened, dusky rheum and knit bones where the surgeons could make only a poor jointure. And to sleep, deeply, to wake refreshed, oh how much of that bottle Mary gave out, she’d never make the accounting! So precious it was, the men would take it without honey or sorghum, cut only with a little water or the last of the rosehip tea; its bitterness was savored as a boiled sweet would be, the promise of sleep an immeasurable reward. Bridget began to take a little when the nights screamed with misery and she found, if she were lucky, the nightmares were muted. Just so with the dreams the lovers made, the tonic rendered them watercolor instead of oil, a dove’s dawn coo from Gabriel’s trumpet. She would still wake with the feeling of their affection or longing despair all around her, but it was more like a mist that sunlight could burn. So a few days became weeks and Bridget began to regain the equanimity she’d not wanted to admit she’d been losing, the pipe and Summers’s afternoon violin concertos poor medicine for her blinding Sight.

When she spied Mary in the old library, sitting quietly with something in her arms, something that kept her from the basket of mending or her account book or the letters she wrote, Bridget felt a cool alert stir her, sleek down her back like rainwater, around her neck like the chilly links of a necklace with a broken clasp. She stepped in the room to assess what was before her.

“What’s this, me fine Head Nurse? Finally listening to the wisdom of your elders and resting a bit?”

“I suppose I am, that is, we are,” Mary replied, her voice purposefully pitched low and soft as she used one hand to fold back a bit of blanket and Bridget saw she held a sleeping baby in her arms, hardly more than three months old by the look of it. 

Walking closer, Bridget observed how comfortably Mary held the baby, as if she’d years of experience when Bridget knew her to be childless. The younger woman looked especially tranquil, a smile on her lips reflected in her dark brown eyes.

“Well, who might this be?” she asked, her own voice matching Mary’s without even a thought.

“This young gentleman is Josiah Ezekiel Culpepper the 3rd, also called Young Josie, so I’m told by his mother, who is here visiting the young master’s father, Josiah Ezekiel Culpepper, Junior, whom we know as Private Culpepper of the Fifth Delaware Division. Dr. Foster took care of Private Culpepper’s leg and he’s sure to be invalided home fairly soon, but Mrs. Culpepper was unwilling to wait and as they live in Wilmington, she ventured the trip to Virginia with her little son. I gather Private Culpepper’s own mother is due to arrive tomorrow to help with her son and grandson, but until then, the poor woman, a girl really, Mrs. Culpepper can’t be more than eighteen, has to shift for herself,” Mary said. She stroked a gentle finger across the baby’s plump cheek and Bridget remembered without words what that felt like; no other sensation ever matched it.

“She showed her husband the baby, but even though he’d been fed and changed before they went onto the ward, he was quite keen to make his displeasure known, so I offered to sit with him a bit so his parents could talk a little. And it didn’t feel right to have such a sweet, small baby in that dirty ward, it’s filthy again every day no matter how hard I work to clean it. So we made our retreat here and Young Josie has been…content.”

Bridget thought Mary seemed content as well, that the Yankee widow must have wanted a child very much to be so satisfied with so little, the chance to hold another woman’s baby for a half-hour. Bridget leaned over and saw Josie Culpepper had the look of a treasured, healthy baby, plump bottom lip pushed out as if he were ready to nurse again, feathery dark eyebrows and wispy dark curls visible underneath a knitted cap.

“What do you suppose he’s dreaming, Matron?” Mary asked. She was abstracted, her eyes caught by the baby but by something else as well that moved across a veil Bridget couldn’t perceive.

“Oh, who’s to say? Probably of his mam, I’d guess, or a full belly. What does anyone dream about—what they want, what they can’t say,” Bridget replied cautiously. She was unsure what Mary meant by her question, how much could be made explicit, and yet to have the entrée was irresistible.

“Do you put much stock in dreams, then, Nurse Mary?”

Mary was quiet, contemplative, shifting the baby a little in her arms, holding him ever so slightly closer to her breast.

“I don’t know, isn’t that odd? For sometimes I think they are nothing or nothing important, and then there are others… I should think they all mean nothing at all but I can’t say that I do. A dream may be full of the strangest things and yet it feels more real than anything else. But what to do with them, to make of them always puzzles me,” Mary said.

_Perhaps_ , Bridget thought to herself, perhaps they might make something of this meandering conversation. Mary seemed disposed to talk openly, musing and wondering, and this could be the way two women with the Sight who were not blood circled each other, sussing the other out delicately, with as little risk as possible. She imagined what she could say next when noise from the hallway drew her attention. Above the regular sounds of the orderlies at their work and desultory talk that drifted by on the air, she could make out raised voices, an argument maybe, and a man’s gait, boots on the bare floorboards.

“We’ll see what Nurse Mary has to say about this!” rang out, like a Sunday church bell, in Foster’s baritone; Bridget realized she had not closed the door behind her as she has intended. 

“Oh, dear!” Mary said, the dismay evident in her tone. “I fear he’ll wake the baby, he sounds as if he’s in a temper already-- it must be something to do with Dr. Hale.”

Whatever had stirred Foster’s ire, he was certain to continue searching for Mary unless he was somehow distracted or subtly redirected. And while Mary’s concern was that Josie Culpepper continue to nap peacefully in her arms, Bridget Brannan was invested solely in her own sleep. For she’d realized as she heard Foster’s hue and cry, that should he come upon Mary, sitting like a Madonna with the baby’s face in profile against her dark dress, should he see that and catch Mary’s eye, then observe her flushed cheek, her head tilted a little as she tried to compose herself by tracing the baby’s damp curls—Bridget would not be sleeping for at least a week, maybe longer. She could not explain how she knew it, only that her Sight told her as her ordinary sight told her what blue was; she knew she would be trapped in their dreams, ones they would not wish to wake from, endless, exquisite consummation and its subsequent animal content, a serene union they had no hope for in reality. 

Bridget told herself she was not being selfish, that such nights might make the hospital’s management falter-- for how could they regard each other in the day after spending their nights thus, how could they taste such joy and not struggle to regain it? The elaborations sleep allowed could not be permitted in the waking world and while Mary would be bereft, silent and withdrawn but still industrious, work her consolation, Foster was a melancholic and Bridget had known of his treacherous history with the needle even before the two had revisited it after midnight, Foster intoxicated, in withdrawal, tortured and cruel and abject. She would not take the chance the hospital could lose a surgeon of his caliber. She decided in the time it took for the baby to stir and root at Mary’s breast just what she would do.

“I’ll see to it, to Dr. Foster, that is. To think he has manners pretty enough for high society, fancy teas and balls, and yet he bellows down the hallway like an angry bull! I’d a mind to say something of it to his fine mother when she came here, but Heaven knows she was worse than he ever is! You needn’t fret about him waking that babby, but his mam better leave off her canoodling with young master’s father as I expect that child needs to be fed within the hour and we’ve nothing here for him,” Bridget announced.

Mary’s face held relief at Bridget’s solution, a nuanced sadness at not being able to nurse the baby in her arms, and always, that light that Foster kindled with his voice, his look, even his tread upon a threshold. And was there something else, a little of Mary’s Sight in the woman’s eyes? Not enough to acknowledge directly, for where would that leave them—what could they say about what passed between them? Could there be more that Mary knew of Bridget as there was a world within Mary Bridget had, did, would travel? There was not the time to address it, not if they wanted the baby to sleep and to prevent Foster from seeing what could not be unseen. 

“I think you are quite right, Matron. How clearly you perceive things-- and I think you will be just the one to… defer Dr. Foster, for the moment. After Mrs. Culpepper has taken her little son back, then I will be able to unravel whatever knot they’ve created this time. Perhaps you might suggest to Dr. Foster he wait for me on the veranda within the hour? Winter is so mild here, it’s like spring at home,” Mary replied.

Bridget nodded and walked out of the room. She would make sure to stop by Mary’s storeroom, but a regular dose of the tonic should be enough. It was an overcast day, so there was no moon or starlight to contend with, and the winter garden was not so evocative as what May promised, or July or even late September’s amber beauty. Mary would wear her dark shawl and let that alone set off her fair face; its voluminous folds might conceal his hand stroking hers and perhaps the night would then only be filled with a spring planting of roses, a pricked finger and the need for a tender kiss that would taste of honey and copper.

“Dr. Foster, for Heaven’s safe, hush yer hollering less ye wish to wake the dead and call down the archangels altogether!” Bridget called out, using the commanding voice she had once sent out the window of her home, down to the street where the boys played at some endless game with a ball, their cheerful aggressions and exclamations a mighty din she could still overwhelm. She ambled as she caught up to Foster, who had slowed when he heard her. 

“Nurse Mary says you’re to wait for her on the veranda but I can’t believe she’s eaten a bite the whole day, the little lady-martyr, so ye might as well head to the kitchen and see what Steward can make up for ye both. And mind, she likes jam on her biscuits, tell Steward not to stint if he’d to remain in your good graces.”

“Ah, Matron. As ever, a pleasure to… acquiesce. Shall you tell me what kind of jam as well?” Foster replied, his previous hostility blunted by even just the mention of Mary.

“Hush, you! As if we’ve more than one kind, me fine pasha! Why don’t ye leave off yer jests and make sure she’ll have a bite to eat and not be the one scurrying to fetch something for ye, as we both know is her way,” Bridget said. 

That ought to be enough to turn him, down the stairs to the kitchen, away from the room where Mary still sat, crooning now to the baby, waiting for his mother to come. She hoped she might dream her own dream tonight, the one where she lay down with her boys around her in their bed and sang to them till they slept beside her, her man watching from the doorway. There was no way to know, but perhaps a wish could make a choice.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Emily Dickinson and the hymns I mentioned are "My Faith Looks Up to Thee" (1832) and "See, Gentle Patience Smiles on Pain" (1835). The Gaelic translates to "my darling." There's almost a horror quality to the dreams, which is not my regular thing, but I thought it made sense here given the degree of trauma.


End file.
